Over the past few decades, EU telecom policy has been driven primarily by objectives of promoting competition, ensuring broad coverage, and delivering affordable connectivity for consumers and businesses. This approach has helped deliver high-quality and affordable telecom services across Europe.
However, policy priorities have begun to shift and take on new meaning in light of geopolitical events of recent years. With the public and private reliance on telecom networks for essential functions, the resilience of telecom networks has become critical in policy agendas.
Against this backdrop, TDC Net has commissioned Copenhagen Economics to assess how Denmark can ensure sufficient investment in resilient telecom infrastructure in the years ahead.
We estimate that TDC Net could face resilience-related investments of up to DKK 4.7 billion between 2026 and 2030, depending on future resilience requirements and the underlying assessment of risks. The potential investment need for TDC Net is estimated according to resilience requirements and assessment of risk divided into three scenarios with investments following those scenarios:
Overall, resilience-related investments in 2030 could correspond to around 40 per cent of TDC Net’s total investment level in 2025.
The current policy framework developed out of a time when objectives were focused on ensuring competition, affordability, and coverage, rather than security and resilience. As such, there are no regulatory tools to address the market failures we identify. Namely:
The public good and quality opacity: The broad societal impact of securing networks against hybrid attacks does not easily translate into monetisable value, creating weaker incentives to invest than is optimal from a societal perspective, and customers cannot easily observe resilience. They choose providers based on speed, data allowance, price, etc., meaning operators have a limited ability to monetise resilience beyond minimum requirements.
Coordination failures: No single actor has the full picture. Without effective coordination, operators’ detailed knowledge of technical solutions and investment costs and the authorities’ insight into societal risks and security priorities could mean that crucial resilience measures are left on the table.
As such, it is timely to revisit the policy framework to ensure it is aligned with today’s policy priorities. Effective resilience requires authorities and operators to work together. A more collaborative approach between authorities and operators can help reduce coordination failures by sharing data, scenarios, and technical assessments, and by aligning expectations on required resilience levels, costs, and priorities. It can thereby operationalise the sector’s social contract, ensuring clear shared objectives, principles for cost recovery, and policy priorities.
Find a detailed description of our findings below.
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